Recent portable terminals can provide more diverse services and optional functions. To improve usefulness of the portable terminal and meet different desires of users, various practical applications have been developed. Accordingly, recent portable terminals, such as smart phones, cell phones, note Personal Computers (PCs) and tablet PCs, which may be carried by the user and have touch screens, can each store at least a couple to hundreds of applications.
Such portable terminals have become advanced to multimedia devices that can provide not only call services but also various multimedia services by way of data communication to meet user demands.
With the development of communication technologies, the portable terminal can also provide messenger services for sending and/or receiving messages between two users or among multiple users. Expansion of data services of telecommunication companies and increase in usage of smart phones lead to growth of usage of messenger services in the portable terminal. Accordingly, users of the portable terminal demand various functions to enable such messenger services to be more intuitively and efficiently used.
In a typical messenger service, when a user involved in a multilateral conversation wants to have one-to-one conversation with one of the participants of the multilateral conversation, the user needs to exit from the multilateral conversation window and newly establish a chat window with the person of interest or use a pre-established chat window. This can cause inconvenience by forcing the user to keep coming and going between the multilateral conversation window and the one-to-one conversation window. For example, in the typical messenger service, to start one-to-one conversation with a particular person during multilateral conversation, the user bothers to close the multilateral conversation window and then activate the one-to-one conversation window. In addition, while the user is answering to a question a participant asked during the multilateral conversation, other participants can keep chatting and thus the screen can be scrolled over, hiding the question out of the current multilateral conversation window. During the multilateral conversation provided by a typical messenger service, the more the answer to the question is delayed, the harder the continuity of conversation can be maintained, thus impeding the flow of the conversation.
Accordingly, a need exists for improving user convenience by providing a one-to-one conversation with a particular person during a multilateral conversation. Another need exists for providing a function to facilitate understanding of content answered to a question of a particular person and call attention to the content.